If that doesn't convince you...

Did you know Drupal was accepted into Google Summer of Code 2017 and that Drupal selected 8 projects? In other words, Google is funding 8 people to contribute to Drupal for 10 weeks worth ~$40,000 USD (thank you Google!). Congratulations to selected students who collectively became one of the top 20 contributing organizations on drupal.org (list @ https://www.drupal.org/organizations). Proud to note that all GSoC 2017 students have already become core contributors!

On Friday, December 9 we are organizing a global virtual Drupal UX sprint. As always, many different features and projects are currently worked on. We'll use this day to work on issues that need UX input or feedback.

Would you guess that Drupal 8 is already one year old? One of my favorite changes with the Drupal 8.0.0 release was that we also chose to turn to scheduled releases (to happen twice a year) as well as semantic versioning (to allow us to make backwards compatible additions and improvements). That meant that we don't need to wait until Drupal 9 to come out with new exciting things, and indeed, there are various exciting initiatives going on in core right now. Maybe so many that they are hard to follow. So we decided to revive regular posts about core's progress so you can see what is going on and where you may be able to help. And this is not even all the things happening, just a sampling.

Last week Dries Buytaert published our plan for media management in Drupal 8 which details at least the immediate plans. The inherent limitation of file based attachment/image management in core is it does not mix well with remote media (Facebook embeds, videos, Digital Asset Management, etc.) and there is no library of media to browse to reuse existing media on the site. Therefore our short term goal is to add a base to support a wide varierty of media as well as a media library and support for embedding such media in posts in general.

To support this plan, we host online meetings every Wednesday at 2pm GMT in #drupal-media on IRC, but without focused time on implementing these, we are unlikely to succeed before the feature deadline of Drupal 8.3 at the end of January 2017. Therefore we are planning the following sprints for this year.

At this point, Drupal needs mentors. Please contact me directly if interested in mentoring a few tasks or many tasks over next few months. We need all the help we can find. Tasks for GCI are meant to be easier for students ages 13-17. Amount of effort to mentor a few tasks is actually easy and enjoyable.

Maybe you have seen Dries Buytaert's DrupalCon keynote and are looking forward to all the goodies coming in future Drupal 8 versions. The truth is none of those things will happen without people who want to make them happen to solve their own challenges with implementing Drupal solutions. Are you implementing decoupled solutions and have issues you are working on? In the middle of building up a suite of integrated media solutions? These core team meetings are ideal to bring in these issues and discuss solutions and to be part of shaping up where Drupal 8 is heading. Read on for details. (Last updated Nov 8th 2016).

Did you know Drupal was accepted into Google Summer of Code 2016 and that 11 Drupal projects were accepted? In other words, Google is funding 11 people to contribute to Drupal for 10 weeks worth a total of $60,500 USD (thank you Google!). Congratulations to selected students who are collectively credited on more than 100 issues fixed in the past 3 months on drupal.org. Coding starts May 23rd and ends August 23rd.